Whose rules are you living everyday?

Posted on January 05, 2015 by Alfred Chung, One of Thousands of Performance Coaches on Noomii.

From young, there were rules that govern the world which we adopt as we grow. These rules define our boundaries of how we live, work and relate to people and the conditions around us.

One of the common structure that defines our rules follow this framework of:

Have, Do, Be

‘If I have more money, I will have the freedom to do the things I love and then I will be happy.’ There are many versions of such rules.

The list of ‘rules’ on how to successfully run a company, a team or our career is endless. Most people subscribe to them without questioning where they came from and who created them, most importantly, why?

Some time ago, I met up with a financial advisor and he shared with me how lost he felt in his career despite having achieved the material gains he yearned for. He felt he has lost his drive and motivation that he once had. He discovered that life’s excitement seems to be diluted, without knowing what cause it.

And he is not alone. Many people I came across attribute it to having a weak motivational factor. However, lack of motivation is just a symptom!

The cause and greatest disease of our time is the lack of meaning.
In our growing up years, we were conditioned to conform to some set of rules, be they societal, institutional, organisational or some alternative group. Failing which, we would feel uncomfortable and no longer safe, secure or stable.

As we progress in life, we drop back down into the concreteness of life and let those rules and roles take control over our lives. After all, we believed these define our boundary. If we break pass them, what would reality become?

Even though we may know something is wrong, we don’t know what it is. We continue the slumber of our concrete world.

Usually, if the individual is lucky, they will start to discover their meaning for the remaining days of their lives when met with personal crisis, such as loss of a job, the failure of marriage, the loss of loved one, the loss of purpose or loss of self-esteem through a period of depression.

It is at this phase people ask themselves, ‘What’s the point?’ They feel despondent because they kept their side of the bargain. They believe they have been a dutiful husband/wife, father/mother, leader, worker, friend and peer and it still didn’t work out. They feel cheated. After all, they played their part – they followed the rules but the reward never arrived or if it did, it wasn’t nearly as good as they were led to believe. They also came at a huge personal cost either through the loss of important relationships or the compromise of their well-being, health and happiness.

For the rest of the people, defining the meaning of their lives is the last thing they will consider even though it creeps on them as a growing sense of dissatisfaction and a recognition that something’s not working.

Many would choose to dull their pain through meaningless activities, habits and distraction.

The range of distraction strategies and games that people play to avoid facing the issue of meaning are numerous. They can come in various forms such as through alcohol, drugs, materialism, obsessive exercise, having an affair, preoccupation with beautifying oneself, mindless pursuit of pleasures and losing ourselves in gaming or in the virtual world.

All these strategies are seeking to find meaning using the Have, Do, Be formula and they just don’t work out the way we wanted. It seems like there is still a nagging void. For some, they suggested themselves that ‘I’m fine’ even though they are not. For others, they perceived those rules as reality, which in reality, can be changed and updated because reality is always changing and expanding. The question is, are we keeping pace with this changing reality?

At some point, the pain of the mid-life crisis becomes very intense; often this is necessary in order to facilitate a breakthrough. People hit ‘rock bottom’ and enter a very dark phase. However, many still seek for solutions that are outside of themselves to fix the problems.

When we finally realise that our parents aren’t going to fix it, our boss isn’t going to fix it, society or the government aren’t going to fix it and that it is down to us to fix it – we finally take ownership, we evolve and we expand our awareness and our potential exponentially. This is an important fundamental to realise, in order to turnaround.

Ultimately, finding meaning is not through the possession of things and people. Many a times, people got owned, without them realising it, thinking that it is a normal reality. When enough is enough, this is where you begin to shift your focus and emphasis.

Discovering meaning comes from shifting our relationship with people, nature, and everything around us; a deep realization that we are all interconnected and that there is life greater than ourselves. It comes from our willingness to look inside of ourselves first and to own up to our own unhelpful patterns or the dark side of our nature. It comes by being responsible for our own personal growth.

If we want to be responsible human beings, we have to learn to be ‘response-able.’ In other words, to be able to respond rather than to react. We choose the response – as opposed to victimhood.

We have come to a time in our development that simply ‘going through the motion’ is not enough.

If we were to find new ways to elevate performance, scale up our results and function more effectively in this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, we need to ‘show up’ differently.

In order to show up differently, it is time to cultivate the ability to really think deeper and pull back from the day-to-day short-sightedness of our life. It requires us to pull back the veil and really question the corporate rules, culture and myths and ask ourselves tough questions, and be willing to go against the grain if that position serves the long-term good of the business, society and the planet.

Alfred Chung
Soul Personal Branding & Performance Optimizer Coach